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Re: What are good reasons for the zerg to not use technology?

Originally Posted by Mislagnissa

Talking with you makes me depressed. The writing in Starcraft is vastly inferior to children's shows like Wakfu, Voltron Legendary Defender, Miraculous and Tales of Arcadia. The fact that adult fanboys are gleefully blind to its absurdity constantly saps my desire to continue writing my vastly superior fanfiction reboot. My currently plotted chapter focuses on "Alarak in his penthouse apartment in Protoss!Commorragh doing BDSM on cloned human slaves (because what else would the dark eldar rip-off be doing?)" and the sheer WTF! factor of that statement is still not sufficient to motivate me.

I suppose I should be happy that I post a new chapter once every year rather than never at all. Many amateur writers are nowhere near that regular.

You can say I'm easier to please in terms of story. In your case, I don't see it possible to please you at all.

Re: What are good reasons for the zerg to not use technology?

I keep telling you, for those who didn't invest as much into the lore, they are more willing to let go if the plot didn't meet the expectation (though even that's supposed to have limits)

I'm not invested in the lore. I don't care specifically that Blizzard butchered the characterization of the zerg and protoss. I care that their writing is just plain bad. It has always been. That Blizzard butchered the characterization of the zerg and protoss is just the icing on their cake of mediocrity.

The SC1 manual lore is nothing more an excuse. We can't just play an RTS where all the units are barely identifiable blobs, they need to have art designs and backstories. The SC1 manual lore provided all that: terrans in Koprulu are attacked by zerg and protoss for some mildly complicated historical reasons that are simple enough for adolescents to understand. Every race has their own self-consistent morality which allows players to root for them while playing. Even the blatantly corrupt and oppressive Confederacy is quite believable.

The games pretty much did the worst they possibly could with that premise. They did not plan ahead, made the plot up as they went along, did not care one whit about consistency or critical thought, lost all sense of scale, introduced literal demigods as main characters, absurd soap opera dynamics, etc.

Insurrection is no Shakespeare, but it uses the same plot points as Metzen's trilogy and executes them in vastly superior fashion. Sure, the zerg campaign is fairly straightforward (which is still vastly better than the pointless filler that was Episode 2) but Nargil's purring verbal quirk automatically gives him more personality than any other zerg character besides the Overmind. It even references the manual's plot points better than Metzen did, introducing things like the determinant (which in an amazing twist, at least for this franchise, actually goes wrong during experimentation), the conflict within the Koprulu expedition over humanity's fate and an alliance between terrans and protoss that feels very believable and organic considering the circumstances (because let's face it, the Raynor/Tassadar alliance felt fake as heck).

Re: What are good reasons for the zerg to not use technology?

Raynor and Tassadar's alliance certainly didn't get off the right way. I didn't read the 2006 Queen of Blades book, but at the beginning, Raynor only took the alliance because associating with Tassadar is better than dealing with the zerg

Re: What are good reasons for the zerg to not use technology?

Originally Posted by ragnarok

Raynor and Tassadar's alliance certainly didn't get off the right way. I didn't read the 2006 Queen of Blades book, but at the beginning, Raynor only took the alliance because associating with Tassadar is better than dealing with the zerg

At that point in time, Raynor had no reason to believe that. Both the zerg and protoss were trying to kill the terrans. Tassadar trying to help was actually cut out of the terran campaign even though that introduced plot holes. It is a lot more believable for Raynor to team up with the genocidal aliens who destroyed his home world if they revealed they were not actually genocidal long before. In fact, the only reason Raynor and Tassadar were even on Char rather than still fighting in the first contact war was because writer mandate said they had to be, even though they contribute nothing to the story. After Rebel Yell the plot of the game falls apart and relies on cameos, contrivances and deus ex machina.

The plot of Rebel Yell is actually totally unbelievable because it makes absolutely no sense the Sons of Korhal would be trying to take over the sector at the same time two hostile alien races are trying to exterminate humanity, nor that their attempts would ever succeed or at least avoid making things even worse for everyone involved. The Sons of Korhal only succeed because of writer fiat, the zerg and protoss only withdraw because of writer fiat, and all the actually important events occur entirely off-screen because Rebel Yell suffers from narrative myopia that treats Raynor, Kerry and Arcturus as the only people of value in the entire universe. If Starcraft had been written by a seasoned military scifi writer, then it would have been filled with numerous characters (most of whom die to hammer the point that life is cheap) and ended on a cliffhanger without resolution of the war because war is complicated.

Re: What are good reasons for the zerg to not use technology?

Originally Posted by Mislagnissa

At that point in time, Raynor had no reason to believe that. Both the zerg and protoss were trying to kill the terrans. Tassadar trying to help was actually cut out of the terran campaign even though that introduced plot holes. It is a lot more believable for Raynor to team up with the genocidal aliens who destroyed his home world if they revealed they were not actually genocidal long before. In fact, the only reason Raynor and Tassadar were even on Char rather than still fighting in the first contact war was because writer mandate said they had to be, even though they contribute nothing to the story. After Rebel Yell the plot of the game falls apart and relies on cameos, contrivances and deus ex machina.

Raynor merely saw (at that moment) that to ally with Tassadar was probably the lesser of two evils. Maybe that's what Blizzard had in mind when it came to BW as well, and why Raynor accepted the so-called alliance with Kerrigan against the UED

Re: What are good reasons for the zerg to not use technology?

Originally Posted by ragnarok

Raynor merely saw (at that moment) that to ally with Tassadar was probably the lesser of two evils. Maybe that's what Blizzard had in mind when it came to BW as well, and why Raynor accepted the so-called alliance with Kerrigan against the UED

The UED wasn’t evil because of BW retcons. It makes no sense he would oppose them, and he wasn’t educated in ancient history either.

Re: What are good reasons for the zerg to not use technology?

Originally Posted by ragnarok

No, but he did admit Kerrigan had a point back then about what the UED were doing with the Zerg

That is a stupid reason to ally with the zerg, especially after Kerry publicly murdered Aldaris. It makes no sense the protoss even let her go free after that. The UED are human and can be reasoned with. They are motivated by fear of the threat posed by the aliens, so it should be possible to convince them to exterminate the zerg preemptively. Instead Raynor teams up with his enemies against the apparent good guys for no sensible reason. Even if the UED were still nazis, they are still better than a swarm of alien locusts that want to exterminate humanity.

The canon plot is nonsensical and we are wasting our time by arguing over it. We are better amateur writers than Metzen is a professional writer, so a better use of our time is to write fanfiction about what StarCraft could have been if Blizzard had hired a competent writer.